Monday, July 17, 2006

Rosey in Cork

Rosey played in Cyprus Avenue last Thursday night. Initially I thought that Anto’ would be playing support for Rosey at this gig because I had seen it advertised in the gigs section on his website. But unfortunately Anto’ did not play support, instead Brendan O’Shea filled this spot. Brendan is originally from Kerry but now lives in New York and was home on holidays. He has one album which he released in 2003 and he is currently hoping to release his second album in Ireland sometime before the end of the year. He played a nice selection of songs before Rosey and his band took to the stage. The band consisted of a guy on piano and a guy with a guitar. The piano player was excellent but I couldn’t get over the fact that he could have passed for a leprechaun (albeit slightly larger than your average leprechaun) any day of the week. His little bowler hat only added to the whole illusion of a larger than life leprechaun. The guitar player was also excellent and the atmosphere on stage between the three musicians was really good and relaxed. I’ve only seen Rosey play on one other occasion and he had a larger supporting band that time. The more pared down version of a band definitely worked. Rosey is a good entertainer and told us stories about the songs that he was about to sing. He also got the audience included in some of the songs which was great fun. I like the fact that Rosey doesn’t take any crap from the audience. He expects an audience to listen when he is playing/singing which to be fair is pretty reasonable. During the gig he made jokes about the ‘boys in chinos’ who had enjoyed the free bar earlier in the night, he also commented about the fact that when people are drinking beer it tends to be all about ‘me, me, me’. There were some talkative people at the gig but for the most part people were there to listen to the music.